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If your business is on Facebook, your brand page will be undergoing a major change March 31, whether you’re ready or not.

That’s the date when all Facebook pages will be converted to the new timeline format. Because this pending deadline requires some action on your part, and presents you with some new opportunities, we gathered some advice from local social media experts to ease the transition.

Facebook sets restrictions, like that it can’t display content about current promotions, or even your contact information. It also can’t contain direct calls for action, like telling people to “like” your Facebook page.

“You have to be careful,” says Ryan Cole, a partner at Colab Digital Marketing. “You can’t make it a billboard.”

That said, the cover photo does still present some branding opportunities, he says.

“Do something creative that depict’s your brand’s image,” he says.

• Add some history

The whole point of timeline is that it lays out your brand’s history, with your most recent posts on top. By default, the oldest event on your timeline, displayed at the bottom, will be the day your Facebook page was created.

However, it’s easy to add older events. Start at the space where you normally post status updates, but choose “milestone” instead of “status.” The first thing you’ll be asked to add is your business’s founding or opening date. Then, you can add other events.

Nathan Carr, a digital strategist at Rowley Snyder Ablah, says the timeline is a great way for a brand to tell its story, especially if the business has a long history.

“On Facebook, it’s been a tough climb humanizing a brand,” he says. “We want a brand to be humanized. ... With timeline, you can go back to when the company opened and flip through, decade by decade, to see this running narrative from the company.”

"The idea with timeline is to tell a story, your brand's story," says social business consultant Mike Beauchamp, who handles social media for The Golf Warehouse. "This lets your page serve as an introduction to your brand to new customers, as well as a way for existing customers to stay current with the latest news, events, sales, products, services, etc. Timeline tells your story, from beginning to end."

Cole does offer one caution: The historic timeline posts still appear in the news stream of those who “like” the brand. He says his news feed was flooded by historic Old Spice posts the day that brand filled in its timeline. To avoid bombarding “likers,” Cole suggests filling in the timeline more gradually.

• Pin posts

While the timeline displays content chronologically, sometimes the most important posts aren’t the most recent. That’s what pinning a post is for.

Once you post an update, click the pencil “edit” icon in its top right corner, and click “pin to top.” If you don’t unpin it before then, it will stay up top for a week.

“This is cool if there’s a specific thing you want to highlight that week,” Cole says.

• Send private messages

For the first time with the new format, brands have the ability to send the type of private messages that individual users have always sent.

Carr says these can be useful especially for interacting with disgruntled customers.

Without messaging, a customer might post on a business’s wall about a bad experience, and the business would be forced to carry out a full customer-service exchange publicly or switch to communicating by phone or email. Private messages also give brands the chance to ask for private information, like a customer’s account number.

“Instead of that problem being played out completely in a social space, now you can send a private message,” Carr says.

• Add branded tabs on top

Another new timeline feature is the app tabs that appear up top, under the cover photo. Carr says these replaced the listing of apps that appeared to the left of a brand’s Facebook page in the previous design.

These spaces will automatically display a few things, like a brand’s photos and its number of “likes.” However, they can also be customized.

Carr says that for businesses that have apps or coupons on their Facebook pages, this is a more prominent way to display them.

• Post great content

Facebook is making a lot of changes to brand pages with timeline, but Cole notes they’re mostly cosmetic.

“Content is still king,” Cole says. “Timeline allows us to see what our friends are saying about a business. If the business doesn’t say anything that I’ll want to engage with, then, timeline or not, they won’t be using Facebook as the truly social platform that many brands love.”

What great Wichita-area Facebook timelines did we miss in our gallery? Head over to our own Facebook timeline and leave us a note about them.